Designing an integrated circuit (IC) has been made considerably easier by the availability of electronic design automation (EDA) tools. An IC can include billions of devices, and can comprise ten to sixteen layers of conductor material. EDA tools allow a designer to describe an integrated circuit based on its desired behavior, and then transform that behavioral description into a set of geometric shapes corresponding to the devices for each of the layers, the set of shapes being called a layout. Included among all the stages of designing an IC, devices must be placed into a floor plan. The devices are then interconnected together with wires made of a conductor material, which are also comprised of geometric shapes that are included in the layout.
Wires can also be interactively created by a designer using EDA tools (e.g., a layout editor tool). When creating a wire on a specific layer, the designer might want to continue the wire on a different layer by transitioning the wire from one layer to another. Conventional EDA tools are capable of allowing the user to do this fairly easily for individual wires and transitions, but for busses containing up to several hundred wires and several different layer transitions, the processes provided by conventional EDA tools can be time consuming and error-prone.